The task of developing a new questionnaire or translating an existing questionnaire into a different language might be overwhelming. The greatest challenge perhaps is to come up with a questionnaire that is psychometrically sound, and is efficient and effective for use in research and clinical settings. This article provides guidelines for the development and translation of questionnaires for application in medical fields, with a special emphasis on perioperative and pain medicine. We provide a framework to guide researchers through the various stages of questionnaire development and translation. To ensure that the questionnaires are psychometrically sound, we present a number of statistical methods to assess the reliability and validity of the questionnaires.

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Introduction:The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used to predict and diagnose hospital anxiety and depression. It has been translated and validated in many languages, but the existing Arabic version was not validated in hospitalized patients. The aim was to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the HADS Questionnaire into Arabic language for in-patient use, especially for surgical wards.Methods:A systematic translation process was used to translate the original English HADS into Arabic. After the pilot study, we validated our version in surgical patients at two tertiary care centers. We tested the reliability of our version using internal consistency. We examined the validity by assessing construct validity, concurrent validity (by testing the associations between HADS, Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale [GAD-7], and Major Depression Inventory [MDI]), and face validity. The questionnaire was administered before and after surgery to examine responsiveness.Results:A total of 110 patients (22 men, 88 women) were included in the study. Cronbach's αs for the HADS anxiety subscale were 0.83 (95% confidence interval: 0.79– 0.88) and for the HADS depression subscale were 0.77 (0.7–0.83). Nearly 36% of the patients reported symptoms indicative of borderline or case anxiety before surgery, which decreased to 25% 1 week after surgery. HADS anxiety score was strongly correlated with GAD-7, and HADS depression score was strongly associated with MDI. Patients with higher American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status and those who remained hospitalized for more than 5 days were more likely to report depression symptoms. Most patients found the HADS questions to be clear and easy to understand, and thought the questionnaire items covered all their problem areas regarding their hospital anxiety and depression.Conclusions:Our Arabic version of HADS is a reliable and valid tool to assess the mood states in hospitalized patients.

Background Physical distancing and other COVID-19 pandemic mitigation strategies may have unintended consequences on a number of health behaviors and health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between perceived change in physical activity or exercise and mental health outcomes over the short-term in response to COVID-19 mitigation strategies in a sample of adult twins. Methods This was a cross-sectional study of 3,971 identical and same-sex fraternal adult twins (909 pairs, 77% identical) from the community-based Washington State Twin Registry. Participants in this study completed an online survey examining the impact of COVID-19 mitigation on a number of health-related behaviors and outcomes, administered between March 26 and April 5, 2020. In the present study, the exposure was perceived change in physical activity or exercise. The outcomes were levels of perceived anxiety and stress. Results More twin pairs reported a decrease in physical activity levels (42%) than those reporting no change (31%) or increased physical activity levels (27%). A perceived decrease in physical activity or exercise was associated with higher stress and anxiety levels. However, the physical activity-stress relationship was confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. On the other hand, the physical activity-anxiety relationship held after controlling for genetic and shared environmental factors, although it was no longer significant after further controlling for age and sex, with older twins more likely to report lower levels of anxiety and females more likely to report higher levels of anxiety. Conclusions Strategies to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic may be impacting physical activity and mental health, with those experiencing a decrease in physical activity also having higher levels

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